China in 1993

Foreign Relations

China continued the generally successful courtship of its Asian neighbours, playing its economic trump card to expand trade and investment with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations states as well as South Korea and Japan. The latter became China’s major trading partner, surpassing Hong Kong, which was a special case. China bitterly denounced Hong Kong Gov. Chris Patten for proposing what were actually quite moderate changes in the British colony’s electoral system before China’s takeover in 1997, but it continued to discuss with the British how to structure the legislative elections in 1995.

During his September visit to Beijing, Indian Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and Li Peng signed a landmark agreement to maintain peace along the Line of Actual Control in the long-disputed border areas pending a final disposition of the conflicting claims. It seemed likely that the eventual territorial settlement would leave things pretty much as they were. Both sides pledged to refrain from the use or threat of force, to provide prior notification of military exercises, and to open up additional border passes to trade. The danger of a Sino-Indian war was at its lowest point in 35 years.

Shortly after the signing of the Middle East peace accords between Israel and various Palestinian organizations, China played host to Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasir Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. China and Israel had a long history of covert cooperation in military technology transfers, although the value and content of such exchanges were in dispute. Elsewhere in the Middle East, China signed a deal to build a 300-MW nuclear power plant in Iran, and it maintained an active interest in the strife-torn neighbouring post-Soviet republics of Central Asia.

The November visit to Beijing of Russian Defense Minister Pavel Grachev produced a five-year military cooperation agreement that would increase Chinese capabilities in such fields as rocketry and antisubmarine warfare. Russia’s hopes of maintaining even a weak position in Asia depended on good neighbourly relations with China.

The U.S. remained a very large thorn in China’s side. In May, Clinton extended China’s most-favoured-nation (MFN) status for another year, but he attached a series of human rights conditions that China had to meet before renewal in 1994. MFN was, in fact, a misnomer because all but a very few countries enjoyed the status. In August, Washington banned the export of certain high-technology equipment to China, alleging that the Chinese export of M-11 missile components to Pakistan violated provisions of the Missile Technology Control Regime, which Beijing had promised to respect. China rejected the charge. In August the U.S. shadowed a Chinese freighter that was reportedly transporting precursor chemicals for mustard and nerve gas to Iran. After a search of the ship’s cargo failed to uncover evidence of such chemicals, Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen (Ch’ien Ch’i-ch’en) blasted the U.S. for acting like "a self-styled world cop who tramples upon international law and norms of international relations." China also denounced the U.S. Congress for opposing the selection of Beijing as an Olympic site. On July 26, at the urging of Rep. Tom Lantos, the House had opposed the selection of Beijing by a vote of 287-99. Washington also threatened to slash quotas for Chinese textile imports unless Beijing curbed cheating via third-country reexports.

Clinton’s reassessment of U.S. policy toward China in September held out some hope of arresting negative developments. High-level contacts between U.S. and Chinese officials, which the U.S. had cut off after the Tiananmen massacre, were restored late in the year. The November meeting between Jiang and Clinton in Seattle was brief and not immediately consequential. Even the resumption of Sino-American dialogue on diverse matters, including military-security affairs and human rights, promised no early resolution of differences. Nonetheless, discussions were better than mutual denunciations.

Chinese leaders calculated that U.S. economic interests in China would weigh heavier in the balance than concern about democracy, human rights, or Tibet. They eagerly courted the U.S. business community, which wanted a large slice of the China pie. But it would take considerable legerdemain for Clinton to circumvent his own human rights criteria for extending MFN status. A burgeoning U.S. trade deficit with China, on the order of $23 billion, did not make things easier.

In sum, uncertainties about the political succession, growing rifts between coastal and interior China, social tensions, and the vacuum of values left by the decay of Marxism-Leninism continued to cloud China’s future. But the bright lights of the booming cities and the unprecedented prosperity enjoyed by the adaptable Communist elite and the proto-capitalist nouveaux riches diverted attention away from the stormy passage that China was still likely to traverse on its voyage from a dying socialism to an as yet unknowable and unnameable new system. Steven Levine

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